Right now I'm building a website for a client who came from a badly done WordPress. Very, very badly done. The moment I took a look, the conversation was won. Not because I was selling smoke, but because what was there didn't hold up.
What I found on that site
No legal notice. In Spain that's not sloppy work: it's illegal. The LSSI requires it and fines can range from €150 to €600,000. No cookie policy, no privacy policy either. With GDPR on top, that's Russian roulette with your own business.
And visually: a typeface you couldn't read, weak contrast, and that ten-year-old website feel. The client would land on their own site and not recognise themselves.
The "WordPress is free" myth
Sure it's free. Like a second-hand car delivered in pieces is free. Then you assemble it, and there goes your summer.
With WordPress you pay somewhere else: - Decent hosting: the €2/month plans crash constantly - Premium plugins: forms, SEO, security, caching — €200-400/year easily - A decent theme: €60-80 if you want something not stuck in 2015 - Your time: hours fighting updates that break the site - The day something fails: paying someone urgently, which costs a lot
What a DIY WordPress won't give you
This is what I tell anyone who asks. A WordPress you set up yourself, no matter how well you followed a YouTube tutorial, will never give you what a developer behind your project will.
When I deliver a site, you message me saying "swap this image, this text, this font, this colour". And it gets done. Today, if possible. No fighting plugins, no visual editor breaking the layout, no hunting which child theme to edit.
That follow-up doesn't come in the WordPress zip file. Ever.
Long term it's much worse
WordPress updates every few weeks. The core, the plugins, the theme. Each update is a mini-lottery: sometimes fine, sometimes a page breaks, sometimes a plugin sneaks in and slows everything down.
A year or two after leaving it alone, you open the dashboard and no idea what to touch. I've seen clients call me with their WordPress down, unable even to get into wp-admin because the password was on a Post-it nobody kept.
A custom-built site with clean code doesn't have 40 moving parts. It has the ones you need, nothing more.
When does WordPress make sense?
To be fair: if you're publishing a blog with three articles a week and need a thousand authors with permissions, or running a very complex shop with endless variants, WordPress or WooCommerce fit. They have their place.
But for most cases — freelancer, SME, local shop, professional with a decent landing and a contact form — it's using a cannon to kill a fly. And the cannon comes with maintenance on top.
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